Correct me if I'm being pretentious, but girls like me turn out to be UN ambassadors, supermodels, TV personalities, and princesses. I read ELLE and see so many girls my age living glamorously. But my life?

It's dull.

I have a safe, boring, underpaying job and a nice (rented) tiny condo furnished with IKEA from my grad-school years. I possess a decent size-6 wardrobe. (I used to be a size 4, but even my eating disorders are dull.) I also have a long history of unsuccessful relationships with guys who took me for granted—this topic alone could produce enough e-mails to overflow your inbox.

I've reached my twenty-ninth year, and I'm not unhappy, but what's holding me back? Why am I underachieving? Why do I keep hiding under my safety blanket, passing up amazing opportunities, accepting boring ones, and waiting for something magical to happen? How do I break out of this horrible shell and embrace a full life? —Almost Fabulous

Miss Almost, My Muskmelon: Bah! You have it backward. A dull life is the best life! First, it feels longer than an exciting life because boredom goes on forever. And, second, an "extremely" beautiful underachiever has time for the small joys—drinking wine on rooftops with friends, chasing the dog around the sofa, sledding down hillsides, pouring syrup onto a stack of blueberry waffles—okay, okay, okay. You don't want the bloody waffles. You want the "glamorous" ELLE life and demand to know what's holding you back.

It so happens that I have some fascinating data that might help you figure it out. Last year Kenneth Shaw and I accidentally started a little matchmaking venture called Tawkify (we wanted to get Kenneth a girlfriend, but never mind). It grew so rapidly and caused so many people to fall in love that we went on to build a platform that entrepreneurs around the country could use to set up their own matchmaking businesses.

Looking at the early numbers, we see that the entrepreneurs who report being happy and who are flourishing (i.e., making money) with their new ventures share expected traits: 1. empathy, 2. focus, 3. talent, 4. luck, 5. creativity. But there's an element that keeps surprising us.

Exhibit A: When Erika Christensen boarded the subway in Brooklyn every morning and rode it to her job at an investment firm in Manhattan, she did what a lot of us do: She looked at all the cute people and made romantic matches between them in her head. But did Erika just build castles in the air? Fill all the drafty bedrooms with hot people and then "wait for something magical to happen"?

Phoo! Erika donned a conductor's hat and began setting people up on Romance Rides! Her startup on Tawkify is called Train Spottings. The press calls her the Love Conductor. The matches she's making are so clever, she's excited the interest of 17—repeat: seventeen—TV production companies. Viz: The surprising element is impatience.

Stop waiting, Miss Almost. The woman who waits for something magical to happen will die beautiful, ignored, and overlooked, curled in her "shell," jabbering in three languages, never realizing she possessed the magic all along.